Spirituality, Economy, Politics
We often say spirituality and politics have nothing to do with each other. But they do, at least the way I understand spirituality. There are two meanings in which I’ve seen the word “spiritual” used: One in the sense of esoteric, metaphysical — matters relating to spirit. Another is in the sense of bringing heart to the table of life. The heart is the great equalizer. (Some people say guns are — but I’d say the heart is.)
To me, spirituality is the understanding that all things are made of God. If I want to love God unconditionally, I want to love life unconditionally — independent from whether what it brings me is a challenge or a delight. In the flow of life, the flow of experiences both pleasant and unpleasant, spirituality to me means to stay focused on one thing: A heart-full, “whole-hearted” presence with all of it.
Therefore I define “spirituality” as bringing heart into the matters of life, bringing heart into the “mundane.” “Mundane” comes from latin mundus, and it means “world.” The “world” is the sacred expression of God. God cannot easily be understood directly, therefore I find it difficult to bring my heart to the abstract thought “God.” But I can love God by understanding that all I perceive is God, made of God, expresses God. The world is the expression, the “light”, of God.
According to my understanding that the world comes into being through a refractionation of consciousness — basically a “trick” of light, an optical illusion of consciousness. “God” has actually never changed; but our consciousness perceives it as if God has changed and become various forms. I am not clear yet how exactly this occurs. Currently it looks to me that by taking a perspective, a way of seeing, automatically correlating other perspectives come into being — such as that you can’t take a bite out of a whole apple without now having an apple with a bite missing, and a piece of apple between your teeth. The apple is still whole — but your experience of the apple is of having a separate piece in your mouth. The same way, by taking a perspective, we’re taking a bite out of the wholeness of God; and now we experience God as “the bite in contrast to all the rest of the apple.”
And so you can see that the entire world is still God — everything we experience, every bright light, and every dark darkness, and every dynamic and transaction between all of these now as if separate aspects. And while we rarely can grasp the abstract thought of the Infinite, Ultimate, “God” directly, we can grasp the world, we can grasp whatever I experience in front of me. And we can aim to love that, what we see, hear, sense, taste — whatever we perceive. Instead of failing at bringing heart to an abstract thought of the Ultimate, we can love God through loving the world, through loving all of life, all of experience. By that, we come to love God in any and all form it takes. The question no longer is: Does God love me unconditionally? The question now has become: Do I love God unconditionally?
And because the world is God-as-if-having-taken-form — a refractionated perception of the whole due to a trick of consciousness — , therefore the “mundane” is the same as the “sacred.” If we want to bring our hearts to God, then bringing our hearts to all of life, to our world, to the “worldly” aspects of our being, is a sacred act. And this is why bringing consciousness and love to our shared governance, aka “politics”, and to the medium by which we share in each other’s life-force, aka “currency,” is a sacred act. And thus it is a spiritual matter.
